Dreamforce 2016 Takeaways – Part 3 of 3 (Mid-Market Customers)

  • The theme for SMB at Dreamforce has traditionally been on how CRM and SF Sales/Service/Marketing technologies aid growth. Automating processes in order to scale them is an attractive theme for SMBs
  • Sales Cloud implementations continue to appear the most prevalent among Salesforce SMB customers. Communities, Service and App Cloud implementations appeared among the CBU customers we spoke to.
  • CPQ, Sales Operations (Pipeline Management, Forecasting, Sales Coaching, Metrics for managing Sales teams), Lead Generation & Prospecting and Communities continue to be the most common topics of interest in this segment
  • A significant section of the customers are integrating data from Marketing Cloud and Pardot products into their Sales Processes. Marketing Cloud and Pardot were discussed separately so far as session topics go.
  • Lightning features such as Kanban, Sales Path, Lightning Voice make significant improvements to a customer’s use of Salesforce. The demos dwelled on use cases where the sales rep and sales managers are utilizing these cool Lightning features.
  • The SMB use cases for Einstein that were being demo’ed included identifying an email from a customer that the pipeline is showing a large deal for and highlighting it for the sales rep as likely to close. Simple, effective.
  • Subscription software businesses and applicability of Salesforce products and CRM processes at subscription businesses are receiving considerable attention as a high-tech industry sub-segment. A number of sessions, app exchange products in the expo were focused on enabling the subscription business processes – volume sales, customer success to predict and avoid churn, lead generation at scale.
Ramana Metlapalli
Ramana Metlapalli
Ramana is a Managing Principal at Varasi. Ramana is a lifelong learner and eternally curious about what goes into making some individuals and organizations, high performance ones. He writes about Business Analysis, Salesforce best practices and the world of Consulting.